Being in the throes of this Great Recession for a few years now has taken a toll on the US economy and workforce. Whether through lost employment, less income, burning through savings which were already depleted from the stock market crash, inflationary pressures or just submission to the general gloom in the air all around; the general population is tired and weary. Everyone wants some good news to grab onto and know that their situations will improve because this Great Recession can’t go on forever. That is why economists, politicians and business leaders are trying to find any sign of hope out there which would signal recovery.
On December 30th, right before most people began to wind down for the New Years celebrations, the Department of Labor came out with a ‘positive’ report about the strengthening economic situation potentially. In the week ending on Dec. 25th, there were only 388,000 new people filing for unemployment insurance. This is a drop of 34,000 claims from the last week and lowers the 4-week moving average to ONLY 414,000 NEW filings a week. This is a good sign we are told but the number is still high and will never capture everyone who is recently out of work because some would rather find a way to make it then to take handouts from the Government. This also coincides with the seasonal increase in temporary workers for the Christmas season.
The report on the 30th comes almost a month after the most recent employment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in which they stated the unemployment rate edge up to 9.8% and that the US only added +39,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. This rise in unemployment with so little job growth is not going to help the US recover quickly. Right now in the US, we have 15.1 million people who are classified as unemployed. Without getting into the exact definition or real estimates for unemployment, let’s do some simple arithmetic while leaving out the new unemployment filers:
15,100,000 unemployed persons (assume full Employment as usually agreed upon at 4% so lower total to 8,936,180 persons who should be employed)
39,000 new nonfarm jobs last month
12 months in a year
(8,936,180/39,000)= 229.133 Months or 19.1 Years to get back to FULL EMPLOYMENT at the current rate.
Now I am a very optimistic individual and believe we will get our economy back on track, but this has to be done through job creation in the private sector. Also I am not trying to scare people into thinking it is horrible out there but in reality it is bad with pockets of good. The main goal of this little fact-finding article is just to make everyone aware of how mundane and small these “good” numbers are and to think logically and objectively into all the news (good or bad) we are told. There is silver linings out in the Economy to be had but we need to not become complacent and just hope it’s going to get better without action on all fronts. If we do not change, the US could be the next chapter in the ‘Lost two decades of Japan” or possibly worse.
Lets work on getting America back employed and with a sense of purpose and greatness again. When Americans have those, we are unstoppable.
